Playing Characters You Despise

Actors are always seeking new opportunities—a compelling and challenging role, a chance to work with intriguing people in the business, a considerable financial opportunity. But what if the next gig comes with the price tag of loathing the character you are playing? Here are some performers who have found themselves deeply conflicted about, if not hating, their characters.

Penn Badgley in You

Penn Badgley portrays the charming, intelligent, and articulate character Joe Goldberg—who also happens to be intensely obsessive and highly dangerous—in the Netflix series You. The Gossip Girl alum admitted he struggles “immensely” with playing such a psychopathic character “every time, other than the period I’m acting on camera, which is between action and cut.”

Although he’s impressed by the way the series manages to continually surprise the audience, Badgley says, “There’s a lot I don’t enjoy about [Joe.] To be honest, I don’t enjoy nearly everything about him.” While he finds nothing redeeming about the sadistic stalker, it’s his job to humanize him, and in fact seduce viewers into believing there’s hope for the savage murderer to live a normal life—if only he could find the right woman.

“I struggled greatly with the conflict of playing such a guy and him partly being so likable and [viewers] having such a, as we say, thirsty response to him,” he shared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Indeed, his fans’ crushes on the villainous character confirmed his greatest fears about the role. “There were the reactions of overlooking all of Joe’s faults, which is the whole point of the show, and just being really into him … It was both gratifying and troubling,” he says. “It’s on us that everybody likes him so much; we’ve created him that way.”

Andrew Lincoln in Love Actually

Andrew Lincoln admitted he felt his lovesick character, Mark, in the British rom-com Love Actually was a creep. “In one of the most romantic movies of all time, I got to play the only guy who doesn’t get the girl,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “The story is set up like a prism looking at all the different qualities of love. Mine was unrequited. So I got to be this weird stalker guy.”

Mark is infatuated with his best friend’s new wife (portrayed by Keira Knightley) and reveals his true feelings to her by famously holding up a series of handwritten signs. Lincoln found himself continually concerned about how his character was coming off. So he kept checking in with the film’s writer-director Richard Curtis to ask, “Are you sure I’m not going to come off as a creepy stalker?” Curtis assured him he would not.

Sarah Michelle Gellar in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In the popular supernatural show’s sixth season, Gellar stopped enjoying playing her character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That season, the show took a dark turn in which Buffy became entangled with the trickster and villainous vampire Spike, and her character suffered abuse in the relationship. Gellar wasn’t comfortable with her actions in that season. She revealed, “I’ve always said that season six was not my favorite. I felt it betrayed who [Buffy] was.” Of the seven-season run, Gellar opted to skip episodes from season six when watching the show with her kids during the pandemic.

Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire

Marlon Brando had a hard time portraying the cruel Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 classic film A Streetcar Named Desire. Although it was his first major screen role and it catapulted his career, Brando reflected, “[Stanley] had the kind of brutal aggressiveness that I hate. I’m afraid of it. I detest the character … He’s everything I’m against.” Stanley clashes with his wife’s sister, Blanche, and is abusive to both her and his wife. And Marlon’s performance was convincing enough to earn an Oscar nod. Still, he hated what the character represented, as well as the way the negative role established him as a sex symbol. He didn’t like being associated with “muscles, inarticulate, aggressive animals who go through life responding to nothing but their urges and never doubting them,” as he wrote in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me.

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